Is Your Website Traffic Sabotaging Your A/B Testing?

You’ve got people on your site who aren’t converting and—since anyone in their right mind would sign up for your product or offer—the reason you’re not getting more conversions must be some sort of user experience (UX) problem.

More Clicks Do Not Equal More Conversions

After promoting quite a few posts on Facebook, I had identified what I thought was a fairly good target audience. However, when I promoted this post to that audience, my conversion rate went down.

At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I was getting a ton of clicks, but the same number of conversions. So, I dove into the details and discovered that most of my extra clicks were coming from 55+ year old women.

Now, as a digital marketing agency, we don’t typically get a ton of clicks from pentagenarian women, but apparently they were resonating with the whole “Spice Up Your Love Life” angle.

Once I tweaked the targeting to exclude the 55+ age group, my overall click-through-rate dropped some, but my conversion rate went back to normal.

Get Your Traffic Back On Track

1. Do Your Homework

Before you even start working on ad copy or a landing page, you should first take the time to do a little research on your target audience.

Here are a few things to consider:

Have you advertised to this segment before? What worked? What didn’t?

If this is a new audience for you, talk to some people in your target audience. Run a couple of ideas past them. Often, what works for you doesn’t work for your audience.

What’s the best way to target your audience? Are there certain intent-based keywords they use? Certain interests on social media? Do they have a certain income level, fashion preference or other defining trait you can use to target them?

Once you’ve nailed down these details, use them to build your targeting schema. A little bit of forethought can save you a lot of wasted ad spend.

2. Create the Scent

The reverse is also true. If you want to market a particular product or offer to a specific audience, your ads need to connect the needs and interests of your target audience to what they will find on your landing page.

In effect, you need to “create the scent.”

Ideally, your message should be so well crafted that only people who would be interested in the content of your landing page will click on your ad and—when they actually hit the landing page—they should immediately feel like they’re in the right place.

3. Get Granular

Expanding on the previous point, it’s perfectly okay to have different marketing material and different landing pages for each type and subtype of audience.

Remember, each audience has different reasons for coming to your landing page and will respond to your page in unique ways.

So, the more audience-specific you can make your ads and landing page, the more likely they are to convert.

5. Pay for What Works

Finally, as your analytics starts to reveal which traffic sources produce conversions, reduce your spend in the areas that aren’t as helpful.

You don’t have to keep spending that wasted 61% of your ad budget on search terms that will never convert!

Instead, create a testing budget for exploring new traffic or targeting opportunities and focus most of your budget on known winners.

And, since you’re now pointing the right sort of traffic at your landing pages, you can expect your A/B tests to really start producing. You’ve got the right audience on your page, make sure the user experience is irresistible!

A Match Made In Heaven

If your traffic isn’t a good match for your landing page objectives, your conversion rate will always be bad. On the other hand, sending great traffic to a terrible landing page won’t win you many conversions either.

Traffic and testing—you need both to succeed online.

By the way, if you’d like me to take a look at your web traffic (or testing, for that matter) to help you get more out of your marketing campaigns, let me know here or in the comments! I’d be happy to help.

You’ve heard my two cents, now it’s your turn. How have you seen bad traffic undermine a great landing page? How do you make sure that your traffic and your landing pages are as effective as possible?

Aden Andrus

Director of Content Marketing

Over his career, Aden has developed and marketed millions of dollars of successful products. He lays awake at nights figuring out new marketing tactics and is constantly upping Disruptive's internal marketing game. He loves to write, dance and destroy computer monitors in full medieval armor.